Afghanistan: Taliban kill four secret service agents
Published on Sunday, September 8, 2013
7:54 AM //
Defence
Maidan Shar (Afghanistan) (AFP) - Four intelligence agents were killed and dozens of civilians wounded in Afghanistan Sunday in an attack by Taliban an Afghan intelligence office (NDS), the day after a strike NATO air that could have killed a dozen civilians.
Sunday afternoon, a group of six armed rebels managed to enter the courtyard of the offices of the Afghan secret service in Maidan Shar, the capital of Wardak province (southwest of Kabul), after exploding a car bomb outside the gate of the building, told AFP the spokesman of local government, Attaullah Khogyani.
"Five attackers and four agents of NDS were killed in the ensuing clashes," for nearly an hour, the sixth who died in the explosion of the car bomb, the official added.
On site, an AFP photographer saw the bodies of five insurgents killed by Afghan forces and a crater several meters in diameter caused by the explosion of a car bomb.
The spokesman said that "thirty civilians" were injured in the attack. But an official from a local hospital, Dr. Ghulam Farooq Wardak, reported a much higher figure: a "153" people, including 23 women and two children were hospitalized, he said, citing 12 people in critical condition.
The attack, claimed by the Taliban, came a day after an air strike by the NATO International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) against a vehicle in which there were insurgents, but also, according to local officials, civilians.
"A civilian vehicle (...) was hit by a shot of drone international forces" in Kunar province, along the Pakistani border, an area where Islamist insurgents have a strong presence, told AFP the head of the local police, Abdul Habib Sayedkhil.
Ten civilians were killed, he said, adding that the attack had also killed "four armed insurgents." These would be installed before the air strike in the vehicle, a pick-up where there were civilians in circumstances that remain to be determined.
The governor of the province, Shujaul Jalala Mulk, expressed a significantly higher balance, evoking death "at least twelve civilians."
"We can confirm that coalition forces conducted a precision strike yesterday (Saturday) in the province of Kunar," responded the international NATO force in Afghanistan (ISAF) said in a statement.
This attack "caused the death of ten members of the enemy forces," said the coalition. "At this stage we have no information on the existence of civilian casualties."
Civilian casualties caused by NATO airstrikes have been a recurring anger of Afghan President Hamid Karzai with regard to the international force. In early February, the Afghan president had forbidden its armed forces to seek air support of NATO, after ten women and children were killed, also in Kunar province.
These shootings and bombings are particularly unpopular with the Afghan population.
"It was a brutal attack," he told AFP Ziarat Gul, a resident of the area where the strikes took place. "Even if the insurgents were in the vehicle, they would not have attacked (...). Civilian Life is more precious and important than those of the insurgents."
Despite nearly twelve years of war, the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001, have not been put out of action, and pursue a violent guerrilla war against the Afghan government and international forces.
The attack Sunday against the Afghan secret service shows that the path to peace will be long and difficult, despite the release Saturday by neighboring Pakistan seven Afghan Taliban leaders, a move intended to "assist the Afghan national reconciliation process," in Islamabad.
